You can see, I hope, that at this point you’re not that far from a blogging engine that reads Markdown files on disk and returns HTML.

Run the Server

In Terminal, navigate to your CoolWebSite folder. Type the following:

ruby CoolApp.rb

You’ll see that WEBrick starts up, and you’ll see a message like this:

== Sinatra/1.4.5 has taken the stage on 4567 for development with backup from WEBrick

Now, in your browser, go to http://localhost:4567. You should see the It Worked! page, in glorious HTML. (You can view the page source to confirm.)

That’s it. Now you’re a web developer — and, what’s more, you have an easy-to-learn and lightweight framework plus a language that should feel very familiar. (No square brackets, but I’m confident you can get by without them.)